Teaching a Biotechnology Curriculum Based on Adapted Primary Literature

Abstract

Adapted primary literature (APL) refers to an educational genre specifically designed to enable the use of research articles for learning biology in high school. The present investigation focuses on the paedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of four high‐school biology teachers who enacted an APL‐based curriculum in biotechnology. Using a constructivist qualitative research approach, we analysed those teachers' aims and beliefs, the instructional strategies they used during the enactment of the curriculum, as well as the outcomes of the enactment as perceived by the teachers and their students, and as reflected in the class observations. Some of the teachers' strategies applied during the enactment, such as the conversational model, were specifically designed for teaching APL‐based curricula. We found that the instructional strategies applied for the adapted articles were associated with cognitive and affective engagement, active learning, inquiry thinking, and understanding of the nature of science. Suitable teacher PCK promoted learning by inquiry in addition to learning on inquiry. Students' challenges were mainly linked to the comprehension of complex, multi‐stage, biotechnological processes and methods that are abundant throughout the curriculum and required the use of previous knowledge in new contexts. A complex interaction of factors, namely teachers' PCK, the APL genre, and the biotechnology content of the curriculum, shaped the instructional strategies of the new curriculum and the outcomes of its enactment